"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies
begins."

By Phil Rockstroh

March 19, 2012 "Information
Clearing House" --- At mid-evening,
on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the
occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because
the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and
destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty
Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS
activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those
who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly
and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as
winter proceeds into spring.

In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian
bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act
by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree
that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the
state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.

Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of
oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when
one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged
protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame,
shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse,
brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.

Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not
a force of democratic passion and outrage.

The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the
NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of
violently crushing perceived rivals.

If rank and file police officers ever surrender
their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass
because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and
that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can
do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of
exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international
superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of
ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.

But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal
augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the
city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide,
before that day arrives.

At our best, as a species, we human beings use our
minds and imaginations to bring less suffering to the world; at our
worst, we use said attributes to rationalize causing so much of it.

Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream
opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by
activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police
enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the
ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the
implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of
these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise
in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed
during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the
state of your health and the condition of your soul.

To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I
know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're
letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given
that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega
point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are
confused regarding the nature of reality.

Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving
a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil
from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos:
Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as
normal and who live ordinary lives.

And it seems to be what you're actually trying to
express is closer to the following: I feel
overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes
me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse
about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the
system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty,
troubled soul.

The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering
are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process
all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to
any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the
environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of
Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount
function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate
criteria of life down to the "bottom line."

But anyone who posits the concept that life can
and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically
controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death
camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of
Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the
practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the
world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking.
The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic
suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.

Yet the agenda of the
corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and
expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace
alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave
individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction.
Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a
habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's
culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of
psychological separation between oneself and reality.

To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself
to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking
the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.

If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by
police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural
makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on
trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent
soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party
with Adolf Eichmann.

To express indifference or to be an apologist for
the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good
Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and
commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military
power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these
beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time,
come to debase everything you hold dear.

How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy
for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the
operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own
degraded condition?

At this point, the awakening of your heart comes
down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where
you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart
yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you
wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving
rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you
can make a home in being lost.

Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to
join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to
songs emanating from the suffering earth.

You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast
as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious
role of being both oppressor and oppressed.

The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of
soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.

This song needs you to lend your voice.

And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a
riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men
and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights
do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."

See also - Police Get Violent As OWS Retakes Zuccotti
Park: Video -On Saturday,
hundreds of protesters marked the six-month anniversary of Occupy
Wall Street by attempting to retake Zuccotti Park. By the end of the
night, 73 had been arrested and the park forcefully cleared.